Monday, February 28th, 2022
12:30 – 2:00 p.m. ET
via Zoom
We were pleased to invite you to the 17th webinar of the “Facing Inequality” series, hosted by the Institute for International Economic Policy and co-sponsored by the GW Interdisciplinary Inequality Series. In this webinar, noted economic historian Trevon Logan discussed his research on “Black Politicians During Reconstruction: Impacts and Backlashes.” Shari Eli, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto, provided discussant remarks, and IIEP Director Jay Shambaugh moderated the discussion.
Racial economic inequality in the United States has substantial roots in history, including not just race-based slavery, but also the failure to move to more equal footing after the Civil War. In this event, Trevon Logan will present results from two papers: “Do Black Politicians Matter?” and “Whitelashing: Black Politicians, Taxes, and Violence.” In this work, he demonstrates the important impact of Black politicians after the war in the Reconstruction South; their presence increased tax revenue and land tenancy, and decreased the black-white literacy gap. He also finds that such increases in tax revenue were followed by a rise in violence against Black politicians, pushing back on the efficacy of these policymakers.
The “Facing Inequality” virtual series focuses on current and emerging inequality issues in the U.S. and around the globe – especially those revealed by the current COVID-19 pandemic. It brings together historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and epidemiologists, within the academy and without, to present work and discuss ideas that can facilitate new interdisciplinary approaches to the problem of inequality. This is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invite you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.
About the Speaker:
Trevon Logan is the Hazel C. Youngberg Distinguished Professor of Economics at The Ohio State University. Professor Logan specializes in economic history, economic demography and applied microeconomics. His research in economic history concerns the development of living standards measures that can be used to directly assess the question of how the human condition has changed over time. He applies the techniques of contemporary living standard measurements to the past as a means of deriving consistent estimates of well-being over time. Most of his historical work uses historical household surveys, but also includes some new data to look at topics such as the returns to education in the early twentieth century, the formation of tastes, and the allocation of resources within the household. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley.
About the Discussant:
Shari Eli is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her fields of research are economic history, health economics and demography. One section of her research explores the ways in which individuals of low socioeconomic status used cash transfers to improve their health status over the course of the lifecycle. Another section explores the intergenerational persistence of welfare receipt as well as the relationship between social assistance and marriage decisions.
John J. Clegg is an historical sociologist working on the roots of mass incarceration in the United States and the comparative political economy of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world.
His dissertation, “From Slavery to Jim Crow: Essays on the Political Economy of Racial Capitalism” (NYU 2018) traced the evolution of forms of labor control and racialization across America’s pivotal decade of Civil War and emancipation.
He is currently working on a comprehensive crowd-sourced database of African American Civil War soldiers as well as a large scale research project on the political economy of mass incarceration.
His work has appeared in The Cambridge Journal of Economics, Social Science History, Critical Historical Studies, Global Labor Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory and The Best American Non-required Reading 2016.
About the Moderator:
Jay Shamba
ugh is a Professor of Economics and International Affairs, and Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. His area of research is macroeconomics and international economics. He has had two stints in public service. He served as a Member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors from 2015-2017. Earlier, he served on the staff of the CEA as a Senior Economist for International Economics and then as the Chief Economist. He also spent 3 years as the Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. Jay is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER and Non-Resident Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings. Prior to joining the faculty at George Washington, Jay taught at Georgetown and Dartmouth and was a visiting scholar at the IMF. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. from the Fletcher School at Tufts, and a B.A. from Yale University.
Guido Alfani is Professor of Economic History at Bocconi University, Milan (Italy). He is also an Affiliated Scholar of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality, New York (U.S.). An economic and social historian and an historical demographer, he published extensively on inequality and social mobility in the long run, on the history of epidemics (especially of plague) and of famines, and on systems of social alliance. Recent works include The Lion’s Share. Inequality and the Rise of the Fiscal State in Preindustrial Europe (2019, with Matteo Di Tullio) and Famine in European History (2017, with Cormac Ó Gráda). During 2012-16 he was the Principal Investigator of the project EINITE-Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe, 1300-1800 (
Abigail Agresta is Assistant Professor of History at George Washington University. Her research examines the religious, environmental, and public health history of the medieval Crown of Aragon. Her first monograph, The Keys to Bread and Wine: Faith, Nature, and Infrastructure in Late Medieval Valencia, will be published by Cornell University Press in July 2022.
Trevor Jackson is an assistant professor of economic history at George Washington University, where he teaches the history of inequality and economic crisis. He works on early modern European economic history, with an emphasis on inequality and financial crisis. His book manuscript, Impunity and Capitalism: Afterlives of European Financial Crisis, 1680-1830, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. It examines how changes in the scope for prosecutorial discretion, technical complexity, and the international mobility of capital diffused the capacity to act with impunity in the economy across the very long eighteenth century. The project argues that impunity has shifted from the sole possession of a legally-immune sovereign to a functional characteristic of technically-skilled professional managers of capital, to an imagined quality of markets themselves, such that a constituent element of the modern economic sphere is that within it, great harm can and will happen to great many people, and nobody will be at fault. Dr. Jackson has taught courses on international economic history ranging from the early modern period to the twentieth century, as well as courses on capitalism and inequality, the history of economic crisis, and the history of human rights. Prior to joining the faculty at the George Washington University, he lectured at the University of California, Berkeley.
Peter Dietsch is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. His research focuses on issues of economic ethics, notably on tax justice, normative dimensions of monetary policy, and on income inequalities. Dietsch is the author of Catching Capital – The Ethics of Tax Competition (Oxford University Press, 2015), co-author of Do Central Banks Serve the People? (Polity Press, 2018), and co-editor of Global Tax Governance – What is Wrong with It and How to Fix It (ECPR Press, 2016). He has published numerous articles and book chapters, and is a regular contributor in the media on debates in his field. Dietsch received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation in 2021 and was nominated to the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada in 2017. Prior to the University of Victoria, Dietsch taught at the Université de Montréal for 16 years. He has been a visiting fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, at the European University Institute in Florence, and at the University of Victoria.
Jonathan Rothbaum is a research economist in the Social, Economic and Housing Statistics Division of the U.S. Census Bureau. He works on the integration of administrative data into the production of income, resource, and wellbeing statistics. His research has focused on nonresponse, measurement error, and data quality in income surveys and on using surveys to study intergenerational mobility in the United States. Prior to joining the Census Bureau in 2013, Rothbaum received his doctorate in economics from George Washington University.
Kathryn Olivarius is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University, where she has taught since 2017. Her research and teaching focus on slavery’s rise and fall in the American South and the wider Atlantic World, disease in the nineteenth century, the history of race and ethnicity, and the social upheaval of the Age of Revolutions. Last year, she was awarded Stanford’s Phi Beta Kappa teaching prize for undergraduate teaching. Before moving to California, she was a Past and Present postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Historical Research in London. Her book entitled Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom will be published by Harvard University Press in Fall 2021. Her article “Immunity, Power, and Belonging in Antebellum New Orleans,” was published by the American Historical Review last year.
Martin Saavedra is an Associate Professor of Economics at Oberlin College and earned his PhD in Economics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2014. He primarily works in the fields of economic history, health economics, and labor economics, and his research focuses on the economics of infectious disease, infant health, and the WW2 internment of Japanese Americans. His work has been published in the Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, the Journal of Economic Literature, among others.
Dayna Bowen Matthew, JD, PhD, is the Dean and Harold H. Greene Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. Dean Matthew is a leader in public health and civil rights law who focuses on racial disparities in health care. She joined the UVA Law faculty in 2017 and is the author of the book Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care. At UVA, she served as Co-Founder and Inaugural Director of The Equity Center, a transdisciplinary research center that seeks to build better relationships between UVA and the Charlottesville community through community-engaged scholarship that tangibly redresses racial and socioeconomic inequality.
Nora Lustig is Samuel Z. Stone Professor of Latin American Economics and the founding Director of the Commitment to Equity Institute (CEQ) at Tulane University. She is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Global Development and the Inter-American Dialogue. Professor Lustig’s research focuses on economic development, inequality and social policies with emphasis on Latin America. Her recent publication Commitment to Equity Handbook: Estimating the Impact of Fiscal Policy on Inequality and Poverty is a step-by-step guide to assessing the impact of taxation and social spending on inequality and poverty in developing countries. Prof. Lustig is a founding member and President Emeritus of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA) and was a co-director of the World Bank’s World Development Report 2000, Attacking Poverty. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Inequality and is a member of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality’s Executive Council. Prof. Lustig served on the Atkinson Commission on Poverty, the High-level Group on Measuring Economic Performance and Social Progress, and the G20 Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance. She received her doctorate in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
Guido Neidhöfer is an advanced researcher in the Labor Markets and Human Resources department at ZEW Mannheim, Germany, as well as a fellow at the College for Interdisciplinary Educational Research (CIDER), visiting scholar at the Center for Distributive, Labor and Social Studies (CEDLAS) of the National University of La Plata, and an associated researcher of the Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Humano (CEDH) of the Universidad de San Andres in Argentina. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of economic inequality, social mobility, education and migration.
Stephen B. Kaplan is an Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs. Professor Kaplan’s research and teaching interests focus on the frontiers of international and comparative political economy, where he specializes in the political economy of global finance and development, the rise of China in the Western Hemisphere, and Latin American politics.
Dr. Michael C. Wolfson received his B.Sc with honours from University of Toronto jointly in mathematics, computer science and economics in 1971, and then a Ph.D. from Cambridge in economics in 1977. He retired as Assistant Chief Statistician, Analysis and Development (which included the Health Statistics program and the central R&D function) at Statistics Canada in 2009. He was awarded a Canada Research Chair in Population Health Modeling in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa for 2010-2017. Prior to joining Statistics Canada, he held increasingly senior positions in the Treasury Board Secretariat, the Department of Finance, the Privy Council Office, the House of Commons, and the Deputy Prime Minister’s Office. While a senior public servant, he was also a founding Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program in Population Health (1988-2003). He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a member of the recently created Canadian Statistics Advisory Council.
James Foster is the Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs, Professor of Economics, and Co-Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the George Washington University. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University. Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His work underlies many well-known social indices including the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) published annually by the UNDP in the Human Development Report, dozens of national MPIs used to guide domestic policy against poverty, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) at USAID, the Gross National Happiness Index of Bhutan, the Better Jobs Index of the InterAmerican Development Bank, and the Statistical Performance Index of the World Bank. Prof. Foster received his PhD in Economics from Cornell University and has a Doctorate Honoris Causa from Universidad Autónoma del Estado Hidalgo (Mexico).
Maggie Chen is Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University. She has served as Director of GW’s Institute for International Economic Policy and worked as an economist in the research department of the World Bank and a consultant for the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the U.S. Congressional Budget Office. Professor Chen’s research areas include multinational firms, international trade, and regional trade agreements. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of International Economics, and Journal of Development Economics. She is a co-editor of Economic Inquiry and an associate editor of Economic Modeling.
Deepa Ollapally is a political scientist specializing in Indian foreign policy, India-China relations, and Asian regional and maritime security. She is Research Professor of International Affairs and the Associate Director of the Sigur Center. She also directs the Rising Powers Initiative, a major research program that tracks and analyzes foreign policy debates in aspiring powers of Asia and Eurasia. Dr. Ollapally is currently working on a funded book, Big Power Competition for Influence in the Indian Ocean Region, which assesses the shifting patterns of geopolitical influence by major powers in the region since 2005 and the drivers of these changes. She is the author of five books including Worldviews of Aspiring Powers (Oxford, 2012) and The Politics of Extremism in South Asia (Cambridge, 2008). Her most recent books are two edited volumes, Energy Security in Asia and Eurasia (Routledge, 2017), and Nuclear Debates in Asia: The Role of Geopolitics and Domestic Processes (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Dr. Ollapally has received grants from the Carnegie Corporation, MacArthur Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Asia Foundation for projects related to India and Asia. Previously, she was Associate Professor at Swarthmore College and has been a Visiting Professor at Kings College, London and at Columbia University. Dr. Ollapally also held senior positions in the policy world including the US Institute of Peace, Washington DC and the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India. She is a frequent commentator in the media, including appearances on CNN, BBC, CBS, Diane Rehm Show and Reuters TV. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University.
